Category Archives: BJP

Pakistan is misunderstood and underestimated. Pakistan and India cannot remain enemies forever. Ruling hearts and minds is the key to unlocking Balochistan’s problems. The world must take India to task over Kashmir.

The betterment of the youth is completely ignored by all political parties

I still recall what I wrote in an article in 2014: I read a comment in the Thomas Reuters Foundation that everyone knows that Imran Khan may be a great pressure cooker in the kitchen, but you can’t trust him to be the chef. I also wrote that from a czar-like prime minister, Nawaz Sharif has been reduced to a deputy commissioner-type character who will deal with the day-to-day running of the country while the army takes care of important issues related to Afghanistan, the US and India. This was quite true until we saw the Turkish coup attempt and the leaking of the news regarding civil-military disagreement on the handling of non-state actors by Dawn’s reporter, Cyril Almeida. Our state functionaries seem to disregard the fact that the common man is keen to get his daily problems solved. In Pakistan, he has followed almost blindly any ray of hope and, unfortunately, he has been betrayed on most occasions.

Nawaz Sharif’s government has rightly invested in the long neglected increase in power generation, but more in-depth and strong reforms are required for a sustainable economy which takes care of the problems of the common man during the short-term and medium-term. Even the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects need transparency and a corruption-free perception for benefits to flow. Nawaz Sharif has tried to take the sole credit for his development projects, particularly the very important CPEC. Continue reading →

I have never attended cricket matches and only once took a bat and a cricket ball in my hands and that was under compulsion from the head master

Markandey Katju, quondam Justice of the Supreme Court of India, is a man who does not mince his words. A maverick, he has a penchant for courting controversies. Not long ago, he dubbed Mahatma Gandhi “a British agent” (he also called Subhash Chandra Bose “a Japanese agent”). Katju accused Gandhi of serving the imperial agenda and declared as a myth the widely held claim that Gandhi won India her freedom. For about twenty years Gandhi practised law in South Africa and in 1915 went back to India, where he became involved in the country’s independence movement. In India, he set out to build a mass political movement by injecting religion into politics, thereby exploiting the deeply held religious sentiments of the people. In almost every meeting he participated, he propagated Hindu religious ideas.

The Congress was converted to a party of the Hindu masses, leading to the Muslims and the Congress becoming polarised. Citing the eminent jurist Seervai in support, Katju has argued that Gandhi’s method of appealing to Hindu ideas inevitably led to partition. Had Katju been in Solon’s Athens, where speaking ill of the dead was prohibited by Solon’s law, his remarks would have got him into hot waters. In twenty first century India, Katju’s remarks touched a raw nerve of the law makers because he had spoken ill of the Father Continue reading →

‘If we don’t talk to Pakistan we will never be able to find a solution…It would be foolish to have cordial relations with Paraguay and just ignore Pakistan’ said the Rajya Sabha member and former diplomat – watch video.

“There is going to be no peace in India or elsewhere except on the basis of freedom,” remained Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s final denouement in The Discovery of India– his third book; written in captivity in Ahmadnagar Fort prison in 1944. Indira Gandhi explained that along with Discovery, Joe’s other booksGlimpses of World HistoryandAn Autobiographywere her close “companions in life”. Indeed, Nehru’s works and political strategy not only influenced his daughter but also inspired political activists in neighbouring Pakistan and elsewhere in the world. Just the other day, India’s government began to declassify secret files to finally settle questions over Subhas Chandra Bose’s death. Bose, a widely admired Congress party frontrunner, aligned his tactics with the Japanese in the 1940s to create a “national army” to fight colonial rule and expel the British from India.

In Discovery, Panditji noted the “astonishing enthusiasm” evoked by the court martial of members of the Indian National Army (INA). In admiration, he remarked that the trial “aroused the country as nothing else had done, and they became the symbols of India fighting for her freedom.” In Nehru’s eyes, INA activists and members, who were in fact his rivals, had “solved the communal problem amongst themselves” because “Hindu, Moslem, Sikh and Christian were all represented”. They had achieved utopia. Or perhaps even Nirvana. Continue reading →

If it is ok for Cameron to repeat Modi’s electoral slogan of ‘Achche din zaroor ayenge’ from the Wembley stage, then it is equally legitimate to challenge that narrative on the streets of London …

Shashi Tharoor’s recent op-ed for The Guardian, where he charged PM Modi with damaging India’s reputation worldwide by waging a ‘war on Muslims’ and on tolerance, was slammed by Modi’s fans, accusing him of tarnishing India’s image, and of a PM who works tirelessly to lift India to a position of prosperity and world leadership. To them it amounted to washing the national dirty laundry in the land of the ex-colonizers, raising the question of appropriateness of criticising and protesting against Modi in the UK. Modi’s London trip indicated how the India media, and Modi’s fans, frame that question. Indian journalists, interested primarily in the pageantry arranged for his official and community functions, and the ‘excitement level’ generated by the visit, not in any critique.

One reporter, to whom I suggested that he should also cover the planned anti-Modi protests, said, “sir, I have come to see my PM speak in Parliament, and to attend the rock star event at Wembley, not to waste my time with critics and protests.” However, Modi travels both as the democratically elected PM of India, and as a hero of the Hindu right. These two personae compete with each other, mobilizing bitterly-opposed coalitions. Modi’s admirers want no light shone on the dark patches of his past, invoking ‘clean chits’. They project him as a wise, unifying figure, representing India as a whole Continue reading →

‘India is being ruled by a Hindu Taliban’ and ‘Narendra Modi is clamping down on tolerance and freedom of expression’ wrote Anish Kapoor last month as the Indian premier visited London.

Narendra Modi is certainly an enemy of the ideals of the true socialist democracy envisioned by great Indian politicians such as Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru and Rajagopalachari. Irrespective of whatever else may have divided these leaders, India’s founding fathers would agree that Modi is an extremist – someone whose crusade to cleanse India of its minorities is at least as dangerous as the jihadi campaign to murder innocents in the name of Islam. The difference, of course, is that Modi, whose politics represents the antithesis of secularism, is the premier of the world’s largest democracy. In this post, after our short preface, our comrade Dr Subir Sinha argues that Modi’s grandiose promises of bullet trains and world leadership are proving less attractive to Indians than the alternative politics of redistribution via subsidies, social programmes, transparency and participation in governance and zero tolerance on corruption.

If anything, in terms of Indian constitutionalism, Modi and his fellow fanatics represent the worst possible ideological outcome that the architects of Indian secularism could possibly have imagined. After all, within the meaning of the constitution, India is a “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic” which guarantees for all its citizens justice (social, economic and political), liberty (thought, expression, belief, faith and worship) and equality Continue reading →

The 2014 election revealed Narendra Modi’s mastery of political language. Sarcasm or mockery, emotion or lofty ambition, hope or fear, Modi’s language was succinct, and immediately understandable. There were early gaffes, the ‘kutte ke pille’ statement for example. But then he upped his game. ‘Shahzada’ simultaneously damned dynasty as undemocratic, and invoked power as shared in a small family and its coterie. References to ‘damaad shree’ hinted at the corruption of the Gandhi family and to its foreign-ness. Modi’s ‘A for B for’ speech listed scams alphabetically to highlight the UPA’s endless corruption, as did his unreservedly crass comment on ‘50 karor ki girlfriend’. More positively, ‘India First’ and ‘Sabka saath sabka vikas’ became the rallying cries for a new constituency that formed behind him.

Where needed, ‘gulabi kranti’ was used. Modi’s language confirmed and generated emotions, hopes, fears and prejudices. ‘Kya bolta hai’, I heard people from who were not BJP voters, as they lined up at the booth to stamp their vote on the kamal chhaap, swayed by language. So why did Modi’s language, and of the BJP campaign as a whole, not cut much ice in Bihar? Unki daal kyun nahin gali, so to speak? Much water has flown under the bridge since Modi’s 2014 victory. The language that once charmed Continue reading →

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